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Studies
2013
Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: A
National Allegory of the French-Algerian War
Nancy E. Virtue
Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, [email protected]
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University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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Opus Citation
Nancy E. Virtue (2013). Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: A National Allegory of the French-Algerian War. Studies in
French Cinema.13 (2), 127-140.
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SFC 13 (2) pp. 127–140 Intellect Limited 2013
Studies in French Cinema
Volume 13 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.13.2.127_1
Nancy Virtue
Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne
Jacques Demy’s Les
Parapluies de Cherbourg:
A national allegory of the
French-Algerian War
Abstract
Keywords
If the French-Algerian War remained for decades a ‘war without a name’, as
Bertrand Tavernier and Patrick Rotman suggested in their so-titled 1992 documentary, for many years it was also considered to be a war without a cinema, both in
France and in Algeria. Benjamin Stora, a historian who has written extensively on
the development of French memory of the Algerian War, speaks of a ‘black hole’
in French cinema of this period, of the absence of films dealing with the war in a
frank and direct manner, both during the war and subsequently. In his opinion,
this absence was indicative of a ‘large scale acquiescence of the Algerian war on
the part of French consciousness, though perhaps on a very subconscious level.’
and suggests that by refusing to speak out directly against the war in their films,
French filmmakers tacitly supported it. An allegorical reading of Jacques Demy’s
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1963), challenges this viewpoint. In this article, I interpret Demy’s film allegorically in order to illuminate its contribution to
French cinema’s understanding of both the war itself and of a nascent post-colonial
France. I argue that Les Parapluies de Cherbourg represents a fundamental crisis
in France’s national identity of the 1960s, a vigorous interrogation of its place in
history and geography posed by the political and economic transformation brought
about by French decolonization.
Demy
Les Parapluies de
Cherbourg
allegory
New Wave
Algerian War
decolonization
127
Nancy Virtue
1. The French Parliament
did not officially
recognize the conflict
in Algeria as a war until
1999 (Cohen 2003: 231).
2. All translations from
French to English in
this article are my own.
3. Algeria is mentioned
explicitly once in the
film when Guy tells
Geneviève that they
will have to postpone
their marriage: ‘With
what’s going on in
Algeria at the moment,
I won’t be back for a
long while’.
4. Although it cannot be
argued that the main
actors in Les Parapluies
de Cherbourg were
big stars – it was, for
example, Catherine
Deneuve’s first big
role and the one that
made her famous –
Rodney Hill makes the
point that ‘despite
their lack of star
status, Demy gave his
lead actors the “star
treatment” in terms
of glamour lighting,
makeup, coiffures, and
costumes – especially
Deneuve’ (Hill 2008: 37).
5. Both Benjamin Stora
(1997: 111) and Philip
Dine (1994: 218) argue
that censorship had a
significant effect on
what kinds of films
were made, resulting
in the absence of the
Algerian war from
most French movies
of the time. Stora
cites a list of films
that were censored
or whose release was
deferred until after the
war because of their
controversial content,
including Jean-Luc
Godard’s Le Petit
Soldat/The Little Soldier
(1960), Jean Rouch’s
Chronique d’un été/
Chronicle of a Summer
(1961), Alain Resnais’
Muriel ou le temps
d’un retour (1963), and
Chris Marker’s Le Joli
Mai (1962) (Stora 1997:
121–23).
128
The French-Algerian war: A war without a cinema?
If the French-Algerian War remained for decades a ‘war without a name,’1
as Bertrand Tavernier and Patrick Rotman suggested in their 1992 documentary, La Guerre sans nom, for many years it was also considered to be
a war without a cinema, both in France and in Algeria. Although in recent
years French filmmakers have begun to deal with the war and its legacy
more directly and graphically – in films, for example, such as Hors la loi/
Outside the Law (Bouchareb, 2010), and L’Ennemi intime/Intimate Ennemies
(Siri, 2007) – historians and film scholars have noted the lack of cinematic
treatment of the war relative, say, to representations of the Vietnam War in
the United States. Benjamin Stora, a historian who has written extensively
on the development of French memory of the Algerian War, speaks of a
‘black hole’ in French cinema of this period, of the absence of films dealing
with the war in a frank and direct manner, both during the war and subsequently. In his opinion, this absence was indicative of a ‘large scale acquiescence of the Algerian war on the part of French consciousness, though
perhaps on a very subconscious level’2 and he suggests that by refusing to
speak out directly against the war in their films, French filmmakers tacitly
supported it (Stora 1997: 182).
Jacques Demy’s film, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(1963), one of the relatively few French films of the 1960s that even attempts
to deal with the war, is also the very kind of film Stora criticizes, because
it does so indirectly and from an exclusively French perspective. As William
Cohen puts it, ‘in the musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1963), the soldier
has gone ‘over there’, but the name ‘Algeria’ is never directly mentioned’
(Cohen 2000: 490).3
Moreover, unlike other New Wave films of the period, which were
generally seen to overtly and radically challenge the cinematic conventions
established by ‘Tradition of Quality’ films, or the ‘cinéma de papa’ that had
dominated post-war France, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg seems to embrace
many of these conventions. Rodney Hill has recently argued that, in fact,
although Les Parapluies de Cherbourg shares some of the ‘most salient characteristics’ of both ‘Tradition of Quality’ films—such as high production
values, an emphasis on ‘Frenchness’, and the use of big stars4—it nonetheless
has a firm grounding in New Wave principles, given, for example, its location shooting, its emphasis on ordinary characters, its focus on contemporary
cultural issues, and the fact that it was written and directed by a single creator or auteur. As Hill puts it, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg ‘represents a curious intersection between the New Wave esthetic and that of the “Tradition of
Quality”, against which the movement claimed to rebel’ (Hill 2008: 27).
If, as Hill argues, Demy’s film is more complex esthetically than it has
previously been acknowledged to be, I believe that Stora’s emphasis on direct
cinematic representations of the Algerian war overlooks the political complexity of even the most seemingly oblique treatments of the war, such as those
that we find in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and films like it of the period – such
as Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7/Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Resnais’s Muriel ou le
temps d’un retour/Muriel (1963) – which were made during or immediately after
the war, in a period of strict state censorship in France.5 In this article, I provide
a close allegorical reading of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. In doing so, I hope to
illuminate the importance of this film in shaping how audiences might have
understood both the war itself and a nascent post-colonial France.
Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
Allegory is a useful tool for explaining the kind of absence Stora criticizes.
Ismael Xavier argues that
the most interesting instances of allegory are those in which the surface
of the text either gives unsatisfactory answers to readers’ interrogations
or remains overly enigmatic, thus inducing a sense of recognition of the
opacity of language and mandating the search for the concealed meaning. The prestige of allegorical exegesis derives from its claims of solving
a textual problem.
(Xavier 2004: 340, emphasis mine)
In the case of Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg it is possible to see the
‘textual problem’ as what Lindeperg and Marshall have called its ‘highly
ambiguous’ relationship to ‘hegemonic ideas and cultural forms of the period’
(Lindeperg and Marshall 2000: 99) or more generally perhaps, as the ‘black
hole’ in French cinema posited by Stora.
By definition, allegory is the public articulation (agoria) between two
‘others’ (allos). National allegories provide an articulation between the past
and the present, the private and the public, the local and the global. In the
case of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, we find not only the esthetic intersection
described by Hill between the relatively conservative ‘Tradition of Quality’
films and the more modern, radical elements of the French New Wave; we
also find an articulation between the spoken and the unspoken; between, on
the one hand, France’s acknowledged past grandeur and, on the other, its
unacknowledged ‘war without a name’ and the concomitant and frantic drive
toward modernization examined by Kristin Ross in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Indeed, Ross counts Demy
among ‘those artists who historicized their era at the time and who gave
full voice to the debates and controversies surrounding modernization’ and
who ‘offered a critique of official representations of a uniformly prosperous
France’ (Ross 1998: 13). I am interested here in exploring more thoroughly
how through allegory Les Parapluies de Cherbourg ‘gives voice’ to the crisis in
France’s national identity posed by the political and economic transformation
brought about by French decolonization.
6. The only interview
cited by Berthomé in
which Demy suggests
a direct, specific link
between the film’s
love story and the
political context of
the Algerian war is
with Graham Petrie in
Film Comment. When
asked by Petrie, ‘Why
do you make films?’,
Demy responds: ‘in
Les Parapluies it was
a matter of love and
unfaithfulness and to
make people aware
of how serious that
situation of such a
love affair was in the
context of the Algerian
War, and this seemed
essential to me’ (Petrie
1971–72: 53).
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: The case for an allegorical
reading
At first glance, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg might appear to be an unlikely
candidate for an allegorical reading. Jacques Demy himself usually avoided
the tendency to speak about his work in overtly political terms. In the numerous interviews cited by Jean-Pierre Berthomé, for example, in Jacques Demy
et les racines du rêve (1984: 366), Demy rarely if ever discusses the broader
political implications of his film, preferring rather to focus on its private
themes (love, fidelity, separation), details about its filming and production, or
its formal elements.6 Though he once described Les Parapluies de Cherbourg as
being about both love and war, calling it, ‘a film against war, against absence,
against all we hate and which ruins happiness, a life … a testimony to peace
and love’ (Demy 1964), there is little to suggest that he intended his film to be
understood as deliberate political allegory. In fact, Demy was criticized over
the course of his career for the lack of political consciousness in his films. New
Wave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, for example, criticized Demy for the
129
Nancy Virtue
perceived detachment of his work: ‘He has an idea of the world he is trying
to apply to the cinema or else … an idea of cinema which he applies to the
world’ (Godard 1972: 217).
Moreover, critics have arguably been distracted by the stylized nature of
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which is known (and widely loved) for its stunning, dreamlike use of Eastman colour and for its entirely sung dialogue,
and which therefore appears on the surface to resist any claim to a broader,
national significance. Its narrative, too, is one in which private lives, though
clearly shaped by national interests and events, are represented as being
disassociated from public concerns. In one of the most moving and operatic moments in the film, the main characters literally appear to float down
a cobblestone street in a tracking shot as they declare their undying love to
each other. The unreal sounds, colours and movements used by Demy to
define their private realities heighten the sense of detachment between the
characters’ individual dream of perfect, insolated love and the national drama
unfolding around them. This apparent disconnection plays out strikingly
through the words and actions of the film’s characters, all of whom appear
oblivious or indifferent to, as Guy puts it, ‘what’s happening in Algeria’. But
it is perhaps the film’s striking use of colour and its modern operatic style
that have led many critics and scholars to focus on its dreamlike, ‘melodramatic’ qualities (Berthomé 1982: 181) and to dismiss it as less serious than
other New Wave films of the period.
Yet, in order to engage in allegorical interpretation, one need not claim
intentionality on the part of the author. It is important to distinguish here
between readings of films that self-consciously present themselves as political
allegories and critical approaches that see all films as potentially allegorical.
Siegfried Kracauer argues that ‘what films reflect are not so much explicit credos
as psychological dispositions—those deep layers of collective mentality which
extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness’ (Kracauer 1947: 6).
According to him, consciously or not, films are reflective of the ‘inner life of
the nation’ from which they emerge (Kracauer 1947: 7). And Xavier points
out that allegory requires the ability on the part of the reader (or viewer) to
recognize the various ways national consciousness becomes encoded through
individual psychology. As he puts it, ‘the presence of national allegories in
film history goes beyond the examples of overt and intentional encoding […]
Recognizing an allegorical dimension in a text requires the ability to perceive
homologies, and national allegories require the understanding of private
lives as representative of public destinies’ (Xavier 2004: 335). Fredric Jameson
makes a similar point, emphasizing the way in which audiences might intuit
such allegories:
If we remain on the level of the intention of the film-maker himself,
who is bound to be limited consciously or unconsciously by his objective situation […] [we] fail to reckon with the political content of daily
life, with the political logic which is already inherent in the raw material
with which the film-maker must work: such political logic will then not
manifest itself as an overt political message, nor will it transform the
film into an unambiguous political statement. But it will certainly make
for the emergence of profound formal contradictions to which the public
cannot but be sensitive, whether or not it yet possesses the conceptual
instruments to understand what those contradictions mean.
(Jameson 1977: 846)
130
Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
Figure 1: The umbrellas in the opening credits (Koch Lorber Films).
Thus, I would argue that Les Parapluies de Cherbourg has more to say about its
broader cultural and political context than critics and scholars have previously
given it credit for. Without claiming that it makes an ‘unambiguous political
statement’, to use Jameson’s term, there is nonetheless much to be learned
from reading Les Parapluies de Cherbourg with an attention to the ‘political
logic’ encoded within it, in other words, allegorically.
The very title of Demy’s film would appear to invite an allegorical reading, to ‘mandate the search for concealed meaning’ as Xavier puts it, for it
functions on multiple levels of signification in the film. The ‘parapluies de
Cherbourg’ refer at the same time to the literal umbrellas that pass before
our eyes in the opening credits of the film (see Figure 1), to Madame Emery’s
commercial establishment, also called ‘Les Parapluies de Cherbourg’, a name
that is as utilitarian or serviceable as the objects it sells, and finally to Demy’s
film, a commodity item in itself, but one that circulates in a much larger,
more international market than that of Cherbourg. By the end of the film,
any visual trace of actual umbrellas or of Madame Emery’s shop have disappeared from the film; indeed, the film ends with a scene in which Cherbourg
is implausibly covered in snow, mitigating any need for umbrellas. Keith
Reader points out that Madame Emery was unable to make a living selling
umbrellas in one of the rainiest towns in France: ‘The beleaguered stuffiness of the provincial petite bourgeoisie comes through in Emery’s failure to
make a go of running an umbrella shop in Cherbourg, notoriously among
the rainiest towns in France’ (Reader 1997: 63). This suggests that the literal
umbrellas of Cherbourg have lost their utility as commodities on the global
market. As objects and as signifiers, they are out of circulation, obsolete,
emptied of meaning. As Kristin Ross puts it, Demy uses the umbrella ‘to
register the outmoded or artisanal world in the face of mass production and
accelerated commodification’ (Ross 1998: 212n). The onomastic multivalence of its title thus suggests that the film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg recuperates and puts back into circulation on a global market that which has lost
relevance and significance historically and geographically, which is arguably
allegory’s calling.
131
Nancy Virtue
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: Articulating between
private and public dramas
Although the narrative of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is highly personal, localized, and temporally specific, the film nonetheless provides an articulation with
the larger national and historical picture of France in the late fifties and sixties.
It provides a detailed picture of what Ross has referred to as the kind of ‘interior
colonialism’ taking place in France during the 1950s and 1960s. As Ross puts
it: ‘modernization requires the creation of such a privatized and depoliticized
broad middle strata: a “national middle class”’ (Ross 1998: 11). Structurally,
the film is divided into three main sections that are then sub-divided according
to specific dates – ‘The Departure’ (November 1957); ‘The Absence’ (January
1958 to April 1958); and ‘The Return’ (March 1959 to December 1963) – each
section echoing significant phases in Algeria’s struggle for independence from
the French. Between 1957 and 1963, the narrative span of the film, France
would abandon its military occupation and the colonial dream of a ‘French
Algeria’ in favor of economic cooperation assured by Algerian oil. The discovery of oil in the Algerian Sahara in 1956 initially intensified the French military offensive; it is estimated that it prolonged the war by at least two years
(see Mahiout 1974: 117). However, Hocine Malti argues that De Gaulle, who
returned to power in 1958, ‘understood that France’s situation had become
untenable, that this war in Algeria had lasted all too long. So why not put an
end to it, giving Algeria its political independence, while simultaneously keeping hold of its Saharan resources?’ (Malti 1997: 7). In the end, many historians
believe that the French economy benefited from decolonization because the
Evian Agreements explicitly assured French oil interests in France. According to
Philip Naylor, ‘the most important correlative of Gaullist foreign policy objectives was to protect the concessions of the French petroleum companies whose
discoveries and subsequent production freed France from an embarrassing overdependence on Anglo-American hydrocarbon purchases’ (Naylor 2000: 65).
Himself a former hero of the Resistance and therefore strongly associated with
the past grandeur of France, De Gaulle represented a link between France’s
military past and its economic future. Under his leadership and encouragement,
France would in the end renounce its outdated dream of being a great colonial
power. In 1960 he asserted that ‘it is quite natural to feel a nostalgia for what
was the empire, just as one can miss the soft glow of oil lamps, the splendor
of sailing ships, the charm of the horse and buggy era. But what of it? There is
no valid policy outside realities’ (De Gaulle 1960: 228). What De Gaulle offered
France was no dream; it was a modern, commercialized, oil-driven ‘reality’.
This tension between the colonial model in France and a more forwardlooking model based on liberal principles of a free-market exchange is thus
allegorized in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg through the conflicts and relationships of its main characters. By enacting on a narrative level the disintegration of the unrealizable love of Guy and Geneviève, the film’s young lovers,
Demy suggests at the same time the impossibility of reconciling these two
incompatible political models in France. The quaint but drab image of old
Cherbourg with its cobblestones and umbrellas shown in the opening credits
of the film, will be replaced at the end of the film (explicitly indicated by Demy
as 1963, the first year of Algerian independence) by the image of Guy’s new
gas station, the perfect signifier of the new Gaullist state.
Geneviève, whom we first see framed by the umbrellas in her mother’s
shop, represents at the beginning of the film a sort of contested commodity.
132
Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
Desired by Guy, yet dominated by her mother, Geneviève is seen struggling for her personal independence and the right to determine for herself
her own future. Madame Emery, for her part, wants her daughter to marry
Roland Cassard, a wealthy diamond merchant whose fortune, as we know
from Demy’s previous film Lola (1961), was made from the illicit sale of South
African gems. Madame Emery realizes fairly early in the film that she will not
be able to force Geneviève to marry Cassard, and adopts toward her a strategy
of veiled coercion, alternating between threats, verbal abuse, and gentle coaxing, an approach that mirrors on a domestic level the ambivalent and duplicitous policies of the French in Algeria in 1957. Up until this point, a series of
ineffective French governments had alternated between promising Algerians
‘integration’ and political reforms, while simultaneously intensifying military
actions, and refusing all the while to call ‘what was happening in Algeria’, as
Guy vaguely puts it, a ‘war’ since, from the French perspective, Algeria was
and always would remain, part of France.
The temporal indicators in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg also allow us to situate Madame Emery’s personal narrative in historical context. Geneviève, who is
seventeen when the film begins, would therefore have been born in 1940 and
her father has been dead for years. Madame Emery, a small business owner who
lives beyond her means, thus represents the generation of people in France who
lived through the Occupation, who made large sacrifices, and who by 1957 were
hoping to recover at least economically from the war. Madame Emery claims to
want a better life for her daughter, but her intentions are clearly self-interested:
‘You know’, she says to Geneviève during one of their many arguments, ‘I too
was courted by a young man other than your father […] I want you to be happy,
I don’t want you to waste your life like I wasted mine’. What Madame Emery
wants is to relive her past through her daughter, and, by marrying off Geneviève
to Roland, to achieve that which she herself was never able to achieve: wealth,
power, social mobility, in short, the French colonial dream.
Less than a year after he leaves for Algeria Geneviève has, as her mother
predicted, ‘forgotten Guy’ and married someone else. From this point on, she
disappears from the film until the last scene in which she appears behind the
wheel of her Mercedes at Guy’s gas station, the very picture of her mother’s
consumerist desires: elegantly dressed, hair done up, filling up her tank with
Esso gasoline (Super, not Regular). At several points in the film, Demy shows
Geneviève and her mother reflected in the same mirror, and by the end of
the film, she appears to have become her mother. Madame Emery’s economic
and moral makeover of her daughter is to some extent reflective of France’s
‘civilizing mission’ in Algeria, for she attempts to create in her daughter an
obedient, submissive, exploitable version of herself. It is thus no coincidence
perhaps that the date Demy assigns to Geneviève’s wedding, Spring 1958,
corresponds precisely to De Gaulle’s return to power, the beginning of the
end of France’s colonial dream of a ‘French Algeria’.
At this point in the film, in the last of its three parts, there is a shift in the
narrative away from Geneviève’s story to a focus on the personal and professional trajectory of Guy. Over the course of the film, Guy, like Geneviève,
undergoes his own transformation. Forced to abandon his dream of marrying
Geneviève and raising their child together, he begins a new life and family
with his childhood friend, Madeleine. And just as Geneviève’s new marriage
signals a dramatic change in economic status, Guy’s new love narrative similarly coincides with his economic transformation; the former gas station
employee, who at the beginning of the film does not even appear to own
7. Clearly, as others
have pointed out, the
pun, cherbourgeois
/cher bourgeois,
was undoubtedly
intentional on Demy’s
part; Guy has at this
point in the film
achieved his beloved
dream of establishing
himself within a
growing French
bourgeois middle class.
133
Nancy Virtue
his own car, ends up fulfilling his lifelong dream of owning his own Esso
gas station, aptly called L’Escale Cherbourgeoise (The Cherbourg Stopover; see
Figure 2). Like his relationship with Madeleine, Guy’s relationship with
gasoline predates and outlasts any other relationship in Les Parapluies de
Cherbourg, and thus transcends the explicit temporal span of the film. We see,
for example, a toy Esso gas station in his childhood bedroom in the apartment
of his Aunt Elise (see Figure 3) and, at the end of the film, his son François
wears a little Esso uniform (see Figure 4). The toy gas station of Guy’s childhood is almost an exact replica of the one he will eventually own. Moreover,
his love affair with oil resembles that of France. Indeed, we first see Guy’s
gas station in 1963, suggesting a correlation between the fulfillment of Guy’s
economic independence and the fulfillment of France’s own economic interests, secured by Gaullist foreign policy in Algeria.
The importance of oil in Guy’s life (and, by extension, in contemporary
French society) is explicitly established in the first scene of Les Parapluies de
Cherbourg. Just as the first time we see Geneviève she is framed by umbrellas, Guy is first shown under the roof of a car. More importantly, Guy and
Geneviève’s love story is repeatedly associated with the love of gasoline. ‘I
love you, Guy. You smell like gasoline’ are the first words Geneviève utters
in the film. Later, when Guy shares with Geneviève his dream of opening
a gas station, she says: ‘you’ll smell of gasoline all day. What happiness!’
Gasoline and oil are thus inextricably linked to the imagined future happiness
Figure 2: L’Escale Cherbourgeoise (Koch Lorber Films). Figure 3: Guy’s toy Esso gas station, right (Koch Lorber
Films).
Figure 4: François’s Esso uniform (Koch Lorber Films). Figure 5: Framed by signifiers of gasoline (Koch Lorber
Films).
134
Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
of the two young lovers. And the fact that they discuss their future plans while
walking along the dilapidated port of Cherbourg in 1957 suggests perhaps the
seductive promise that Saharan oil, newly discovered in Algeria, was offering
France at this precise moment.
Furthermore, the choice of Esso, a French subsidiary of the American
company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, is most likely significant. It reflects the
lingering dependence of France during the war on foreign oil controlled by the
Anglo-American coalition and, perhaps, the desire on the part of the French
to extricate themselves from this dependence through Saharan oil.
Guy’s twinned desire, his dream of a marriage base on love and Esso
gasoline, is shattered in the very next scene of the film in which he announces
to Geneviève that he will be leaving Cherbourg to fight in the war in Algeria.
‘So we’ll have to put off our discussion of marriage’, he says: ‘with everything
that’s going on in Algeria right now, I won’t be coming back for a long time’.
Guy’s obtuseness when referring to the war hides a harsh irony: however
sweet and innocuous his dreams for marriage and a gas station may appear
to be on a personal level, they are untenable and even somewhat sinister on a
national level. For in 1957, the year Guy is conscripted to Algeria, companies
like Esso are supplying the ever-increasing demand for French oil which, in
turn, is prolonging the war in Algeria, which, in turn, is exactly that which
jeopardizes Guy’s dream of owning his own Esso station. It is doubtless no
coincidence that during this scene references to gasoline (an Esso sign, a gas
pump, the reflection of the Esso sign) and signifiers of the demand for gasoline (a car and a boat engine) eerily frame the young couple, even seem to be
closing in on them (see Figure 5). By associating Guy’s dream of a life with
Geneviève and France’s colonial dream of appropriating Saharan oil, Demy
suggests that both are economically and morally bankrupt and therefore
doomed, for they are both based on the desire for commodities that do not
belong to them and that will be hotly contested.
However, an ideal consumer society is one in which consumers buy according to their means. If, thanks to Madame Emery’s ability to commodify her own
daughter, to put her outside of Guy’s buying power, Guy is able nonetheless
to reconstruct a version of his childhood dream with Madeleine, his childhood
friend and caretaker of Aunt Elise, Guy’s surrogate mother. On the surface,
Guy ends up with everything he had dreamed of in the beginning of the film:
a woman who loves him, a child, and above all, a gas station. He even names
the son he has with Madeleine François, a repetition of the name chosen for
his daughter with Geneviève, Françoise. His life with Madeleine, a rehabilitated
version of what he might have lived with Geneviève, arguably lacks the passion
and spark of his first love. His new dream is, as he puts it rather mutedly,
‘to be happy with a woman in a life that we will have chosen together’. This
may not be an exact twin of the happiness that he had originally imagined in
Cherbourg, but it is like that dream, it is ‘cherbourgeois’, as the name of his
gas station suggests. Unlike Madame Emery, who sells her umbrella shop and
moves to Paris, Guy stays in Cherbourg and buys his gas station. Madame
Emery, achieves her lifelong dream of not having to work, of being economically
dependent on a wealthy man, but in the process, she is revealed to be morally
bankrupt, having mortgaged her daughter’s future happiness to ensure her
own. Guy, on the other hand, is in the end morally and economically redeemed,
for he invests his inheritance from Aunt Elise in oil and his heart in Madeleine.
He is reflective of the kind of ‘new man’ Ross describes, both a product and
agent of modernization: ‘modernization brought into being a whole new range
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of middlemen and go-betweens, new social types that dominated and profited
from the transformations wrought by the state’ (Ross 1998: 8).
The new love narrative between Guy and Madeleine, which dominates the
last segment of the film, is reflective of the new political and economic era of
Gaullist post-war France. If Guy’s relationship to Geneviève was as doomed as
France’s colonial hold on Algeria, Guy’s marriage to Madeleine shows shining
new promise. In sharp contrast to Geneviève’s marriage to Roland Cassard, the
consummate colonialist who seems perfectly happy to appropriate that which
is not his, whether it be another man’s fiancée or another country’s diamonds,
Guy’s marriage to Madeleine appears, rather, to be a union based on a reciprocal
model of free exchange, not only of respect and affection, but also of consumer
goods. Madeleine, like Geneviève, is a good consumer and, as we see in the
last scene, she is every bit as well-dressed and well-coiffed as Geneviève as she
runs off before dinner to window-shop with her son. However, and in sharp
contrast to Geneviève’s blatant and abject consumerism, Madeleine’s participation in the burgeoning consumer culture of a newly modernized France –
suggested in the last scene by the obvious joy she takes in buying Christmas
gifts for her family – does not impoverish her life in any sense; on the contrary,
it allows her to invest in the shared future of her family and, by extension, of
Cherbourg and France in general. In the film’s final sequence, in which Guy
and Madeleine declare their love for each other from within the gas station,
where they now live, they are framed by the Esso pump and by their Christmas
tree (see Figure 6), which signifies the new buying power the gas station has
brought them. It is no doubt significant that Guy proposes to Madeleine on the
same day that we see him signing papers for the purchase of his gas station. If
Guy smells of gasoline, Madeleine does not seem to notice, for she fully inhabits both the gas station he has purchased and the dream it represents. Just
as France’s economic interests were newly secured by the Évian Agreements
of 1962, Guy’s financial, moral, and emotional well-being are all inextricably
linked in the film to his marriage with Madeleine.
However inevitable, the decolonization of Algeria represented an enormous compromise to France. The imperial ground lost in Indochina in 1954
Figure 6: Framed by the Esso pump and by the Christmas tree (Koch Lorber Films).
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Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
would not be redeemed in Algeria, and as the French soon learned, they
would not be allowed to exploit Algeria’s oil reserves free of charge. French
modernization, so clearly under way in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, would
from now on, come at a price. However, what was at stake was the survival
not only of Algeria but also of France. De Gaulle understood this all too
well; as he said in 1959: ‘those who shout the loudest for integration are
the very same people who opposed this step [before]. What they want is for
someone to give them back Papa’s Algeria (‘L’Algérie de Papa’). But Papa’s
Algeria is dead, and if they don’t understand that, they will die with it’ (De
Gaulle, interview with Pierre Laffont in L’Echo d’Alger, 29 April 1959, cited in
Lacouture 1986: 60). When Papa’s Algeria died, a certain image of France –
that of Geneviève’s maman – necessarily died with it, but ceded its place to
a new generation of French consumers, the generation represented in Les
Parapluies Cherbourg by Guy’s children from different mothers, François and
Françoise, whose very names suggest, perhaps, a new generation of ‘true’
French men and women, born consumers. In the final sequence of the film
both children are scolded by their mothers, Françoise for playing with the
horn of her mother’s car (‘the horn is not a game’), and François for drumming on an Esso oil can. The two children, who are half-siblings, may share
little in common other than their father, but they represent between them
both the supply and the demand for oil in France, which as their mothers’
scolding suggests, is serious business. For if ‘Papa’s Algeria’ was dead in
1963, the date at which the narrative of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg draws to a
close, France had a new ‘papa’ in De Gaulle, who had found a way to provide
for his country’s growing need for oil by negotiating Algeria’s political independence in exchange for economic interdependence, and by insisting that
the French relinquish political control of the colonies in order to compete
economically on the world market with countries like the United States. In
this way, he fathered a new identity for France based this time not on military power but on ‘buying power’, uniting the twinned interests of French
hegemonic potential: politics and economics.
Demy, whose father owned a gas station, once said that he could ‘smell
the difference between Shell and BP’ oil (Roud 1964: 139). In fact, Demy
deeply disappointed his father by failing to take over the family business and
to choose a more ‘practical’ career than cinema. The candy-coloured, singsongy Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, at first glance, would seem to be a similarly impractical choice for an expression of contemporary French events,
an implausible vehicle for any kind of serious political message, particularly when compared to the more sombre, black and white, documentarystyle films of other New Wave directors of the time. To the disappointment
of some, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is not a radical, direct indictment of
France’s war in Algeria. In fact, in the end, the only explicit visual reference
to Algeria in the film is a black and white photograph that Guy sends to
Geneviève a little more than half way through the film. The photo, which
shows Guy in uniform next to the gaping doorway of what appears to be
a mosque, fails to arouse in Geneviève a sense of memory. Gazing at the
photo, Geneviève wonders aloud at the fact that Guy is slipping from her
memory: ‘it seems like Guy has been gone for years. When I look at this
photo I even forget what his face looks like. And when I think of him, all I
see is this photo’.
Just as the black and white picture in Demy’s film is unable revive the
memory of Guy for Geneviève, Demy’s motion picture makes no claim to revive
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Nancy Virtue
Figure 7: The photo of Guy (Koch Lorber Films).
national memory by allegorizing decolonization. Modern, post-Benjaminian
allegory, says Xavier, is:
the sign of a new consciousness of history where the appeal to analogies and to a vivid memory of the past is now taken not as the celebration of an identity connecting past and present, but as an experience
able to teach us that repetition is always an illusion, and that old facts,
like old signs, lose their ‘original’ meaning when looked at from a new
perspective.
(Xavier 2004: 349)
When examined through an allegorical lens, old signs do indeed take on new
meaning in Demy’s film. If Les Parapluies de Cherbourg documents anything, it
is precisely the demise of signs in France over time and their replacement with
new signs, from umbrellas to gasoline, from old empires to new republics, from
classical operas to Hollywood-inspired musicals. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is
allegorical in the most literal sense of the term, allos agoria, publicly articulating between two others, between the past and the present, strange halfsiblings. However, true to modern allegory, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg is no
mere celebration of the good old days of ‘Papa’s Algeria’; it is undoubtedly a
nostalgic film, but one that is intensely conscious its own time and place, in
both a political and esthetic sense. For, true to his own generation of New
Wave filmmakers, Demy enacts in his film the harsh national truth that was
the demise of French political imperialism, of ‘Papa’s Algeria’, and he does
so, as Godard famously put it, ‘at 24 frames a second’. At the same time,
however, he also pays homage not only to his own father, a humble provincial mechanic, but to his spiritual forefathers, both political and artistic, those
men of his past who helped form his identity as a young man, as a citizen of
the fledgling fifth Republic, and as a filmmaker raised in the tradition of the
‘cinéma de Papa’. In the end, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg reminds us that even
the most self-consciously artificial and commercially viable films can convey
truth and, in some cases, have profound political currency.
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Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
References
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Cohen, W. (2003), ‘The Algerian War and the revision of France’s overseas
mission’, French Colonial History, 4, pp. 227–39.
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1962), Paris: Plon.
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de Cherbourg’, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/culture/france/cinema/
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Suggested citation
Virtue, N. (2013), ‘Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: A national
allegory of the French-Algerian War’, Studies in French Cinema 13: 2,
pp. 127–140, doi: 10.1386/sfc.13.2.127_1
Contributor details
Nancy Virtue is Associate Professor of French at Indiana University–Purdue
University Fort Wayne. She has published several articles on the French
Renaissance novella. More recently, she has been working on the representation of the Algerian War in French cinema. Her last article, ‘Memory, Trauma,
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and the French-Algerian War: Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005)’, was published
in Modern and Contemporary France in 2011.
Contact: Department of International Language and Culture Studies, IPFW,
2101 E. Coliseum Blvd., Fort Wayne, IN 46805, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]
Nancy Virtue has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
140
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